Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Continue reading "Broken by This War" at The Progressive...

Pounding on several deadlines at once, so for the moment, here's something to chew on...

References to Anna Nicole and Walter Reed on cable networks on March 2:

Courtesy of ThinkProgress, with more details here...

Discuss.

heheh...

(Hat-tip Josh Marshall, who claims he's "been assured that the creators are not connected to the Obama campaign.")

*** Special to The BRAD BLOG
*** by Libby/CIA Leak Trial Correspondent Margie Burns

“Postmortem” isn’t really the right term here, since Libby’s defense team promptly announced that it will file motions for a new trial and, if those are denied, will appeal the verdict. Also, nobody died. At least in the trial itself.

But I do want to wind up with one final post on the Libby trial before going on to other matters including Sibel Edmonds. Instead of going to my notes and the documentation, this time I’ll stick with that much-abused and exploited faculty of memory invoked in the trial. (BTW, memory is always selective. That’s why we have the word “memory,” to distinguish that which we can remember from that which we cannot.)...

Still more good news today! The appellate court in Missouri agrees with The BRAD BLOG!

The stories that were censored in Kansas over the weekend, regarding allegations of wrongdoing by the Kansas City Board of Public Utilities, have now been un-censored:

Late Sunday night, The BRAD BLOG exclusively ran the censored stories in full --- in First Amendment solidarity with the two censored papers --- in the belief that the stories are in the public interest. Looks like the appellate court agrees with us.

As we've got our hands more than full, we'll leave it to the folks in Kansas now to deal with the substance of the story itself (which was/is quite troubling). In any case, we'll consider this a happy ending. For a change.

Sent to The BRAD BLOG by the House Judiciary Democrats concerning this morning's oversight hearings on the U.S. Attorney firings (full statement posted at end of this article):

In regard to the alleged threats of retaliation against the attorneys for speaking out on this, an email from Cummins, published by Sacramento Bee, gives contemporaneous specifics. According to SacBee...

Of course, Gonzales today said none of it ever happened, these aren't the droids you're looking for.

The complete statement issued by the Judiciary Committee Democrats follows below...

SEN. CHUCK HAGEL (R-NE) IN ESQUIRE TODAY...

UPDATES FROM BRAD:

In meetings, on deadlines, and following several items at once is BRAD BLOG Libby Trial correspondent Margie Burns, with whom we've been in contact from the courthouse. She's now back at her home office, and we'll have details from her soon.

For the moment, we'll point to coverage from the two outlets that bothered to investigate and report on this story while the MSM was completely ignoring it:
+ RAW STORY's coverage...
+ Huffington Posts's coverage...
+ Libby Trial bloggers (firedoglake, etc.) react, Wilson/Plame statement...

We'll also point you to Burns's earlier piece this morning concerning questions worth asking, which are even more relevant, in our opinion, now that Libby has been found guilty. What exactly were Cheney and Bush and their aides told about the CIA findings that the Iraq/Niger uranium yellowcake story was bogus way back in 2002? Burns examines here...

FURTHER UPDATE 12:42pm PT:
FROM BRAD BLOG LIBBY TRIAL CORRESPONDENT MARGIE BURNS

Margie sends in the following based on her observations and notes from this morning, as the verdict was read and beyond...

*** Special to The BRAD BLOG
*** by Libby/CIA Leak Trial Correspondent Margie Burns

Testimony in the Libby trial from CIA briefer Craig Schmall, who had the unenviable task of getting up in the wee small hours to brief Vice President Cheney and Lewis "Scooter" Libby from Summer 2002 through the end of May 2004, establishes that the tables of contents of the CIA briefing binders for that period “still exist.”

As Schmall states clearly on the record, when he sent the briefing binders to shredder and burn bag, he kept the topic headings – where, not stated. But somewhere in the Executive, at this moment, rest stacks of Tables of Contents with at least a short-title indication of what Cheney, Libby and others, including Rumsfeld, were briefed on, for any given date.

Presumably Schmall isn’t the only intelligence briefer who kept these things, either. His trial testimony and exhibits refer to two previous briefers, one unnamed, for Cheney and Libby.

At this point it would be ludicrous for the administration to try to keep those tables of contents secret by claiming “national security.” There would be far more potential damage to domestic security in leaving a giant secret stash of blackmail material around...

Out this morning from the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition...

Details, including new information in the case of gag-ordered FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, and her attempt to tell her story posted by RAW STORY right here...

Credentialed "Conservative" bloggers from last weekend's CPAC have created a petition calling for "speaking invitations [to] no longer be extended to Ann Coulter" at the conference.

They declare that "the Age of Ann has passed."

You'll pardon us if we're less than impressed by the call. The "Age of Ann" has been in full swing for years, in no small part, due to folks like the ones signed onto this "open letter," and only now that she's uttered a line that even they can't apologize for --- in calling John Edwards a "faggot" --- are they hoping to protect themselves by disassociating.

Where were they after she referred to Arabs as "ragheads" at last years conference and joked about "taking a shot" at killing Bill Clinton?

Or when she joked about assassinating Justice John Paul Stevens? Blowing up the NY Times building? Bludgeoning Democrats with baseball bats? And claiming that 9/11 widows were "enjoying" their husbands' deaths?

Where were they when Coulter posted the private, unpublished family phone number of BRAD BLOG Guest Blogger Lydia Cornell in retaliation for our having posted her responsible, journalistic article which was critical of Coulter? (Coulter was able to run Lydia's phone number on the front page of her website for days, since Lydia mistakenly offered her the courtesy of commenting on the charges prior to running the article and so had emailed her private phone number to make responding easy. The death threats and visits to Lydia's house received in return thereafter, we suppose, are thanks for that professional courtesy.)

In February of 2006, The BRAD BLOG posted a short video, revealing Coulter's long-documented record of hate-speech, as compiled by a true conservative, Daniel Borchers of Citizens for Principled Conservatism. Prior to that, in 2005, we posted his Powerpoint presentation documenting her hypocritical claims of "Christian Values." Borchers has been calling on conservatives to rid the poison that is Coulter from their movement for years, long before it's now gotten so hot that these "conservative" bloggers have little choice but to do so in order to save themselves.

All throughout, these phonies have been welcoming her, and apologizing for her, as one of the GOP's top draws at political fund raisers from coast to coast.

Where are the mea culpas from these newly-ashamed "conservative" bloggers for having given Coulter a pass themselves all of these years? Why is it that they've suddenly discovered Christian and/or Family and/or Human Values? Will they be issuing their own apologies for enabling such a vile person for so long?

And while we're at it --- since it's been shown, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Coulter committed felony Voter Fraud down in Florida, will these "law and order conservatives" be condemning her for that as well? Even while they support legislation supposedly meant to curb such fraud (but in actuality devised solely to help keep legally-registered voters away from the polls)?

Somehow, we doubt it.

UPDATE 3/6/06: Appellate judge overturns ruling! Story now un-censored! Glad we were right on this one from the get-go! Details...

===

Ed Note: Since running this story originally, the Google cache has also now been purged of the censored documents. Fortunately, we screen-captured and ran the text in full for each story below, as we believe them to be in the public interest. We have retained all of the original links to the locations of the story, despite their having been scrubbed.

A judge in Kansas City, Kansas, on Friday issued a temporary restraining order requiring that two area newspapers remove articles from their website which reported on alleged malfeasance by the Board of Public Utilities (BPU).

Jackson County Circuit Court Judge Kelly Moorhouse found in a 3-page order [PDF] that the stories were based on privileged attorney-client information, which was leaked to the newspapers, and that publication of any portion of it would cause "irreparable harm" to the BPU.

The Kansas City Star and The Pitch, a local news weekly, both reported about the forced removal of the material and their intention to appeal the rare judicial decision to censor their reporting. A story was also run about the matter by AP.

At the end of this article The BRAD BLOG will run the Kansas City Star's short article in full since it has been ordered removed --- foolishly in our opinion, particularly in the Internet age when such stories are instantly archived, as was this one, by Google's cache engine --- and appears clearly to be in the best interest of the public and their right to know about how their public utilities are being run...

*** Special to The BRAD BLOG
*** By Guest Blogger Jim Cirile

Clint Curtis just won’t roll over. And that, fellow Americans, is a very good thing.

Curtis came to prominence a few years back when The BRAD BLOG broke the story of his blowing the whistle on Republican congressman Tom Feeney (FL-24) who, as Curtis alleged in a sworn affidavit, asked him to write an election-rigging software prototype when both men worked at the same Oviedo, FL, software firm in 2000. Curtis was a programmer, Feeney was then Speaker of the Florida House as well as the general counsel and registered lobbyist for the company, Yang Enterprises, Inc. (YEI)

A lifelong Republican, Curtis did as asked, believing the program was meant to be used to prevent election tampering by Democrats. When he learned the true purpose was to manipulate the vote in South Florida, Curtis went to the authorities and finally to the public. The BRAD BLOG has been following his story closely ever since.

Last year Curtis, who switched to the Democratic party in the wake of his experience and others like it with Feeney and YEI, challenged the powerful Feeney on his own turf --- he ran against him for the U.S. House seat in Florida’s 24th district, where Feeney had ascended in 2002.. Feeney's campaign against Curtis was as slimy as expected, with the powerful Republican friend of DeLay, Abramoff, and the whole bunch spending big bucks on a smear campaign in hopes of painting Curtis as a wacko conspiracy theorist, despite years of evidence shoring up Curtis’s original claims – including his successful passing of a polygraph test – and one report after another revealing massive holes in the claims of innocence by both Feeney and YEI.

Despite pre-election polls, including one from Zogby International, Inc., just prior to the election, showing the two men to be in a statistical dead heat, Feeney defeated Curtis 58% to 42% according to Florida’s officially certified election results.

But Curtis smelled a rat. Backed up by polling and his remarkable online vote verification tool, VoteNow 2006, he refused to concede. His race is now one of five challenges (four of them from the state of Florida, including the well-known FL-13 Jennings/Buchanan contest) currently pending in the U.S. Congress as having been filed under the Federal Contested Elections Act.

We spoke with Curtis late last week about what’s going on with those challenges, about his ongoing efforts to lobby Congress to finally bring reform to our broken election system, his experience with the Democrats "50 State Strategy," and whether he plans to run against Feeney again in 2008.

Suffice to say, like those three gals from Texas, Clint Curtis isn't "ready to make nice" either…

While it's unlikely to get as much attention as Ann Coulter calling him a "faggot" during her speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) last night, The BRAD BLOG has learned that John Edwards is the first Presidential Candidate to announce his support for a growing movement calling for a ban on the use of all Direct Recording Electronic (DRE, usually touch-screen) voting systems in American elections.

The BRAD BLOG was contacted late last night by Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) Board Chair Mimi Kennedy with the news that during a campaign event in Los Angeles Edwards agreed to join her organization in calling for an end to electronic ballots in American elections.

PDA has been one of many groups calling for the ban and other important amendments to Rep. Rush Holt's (D-NJ) new Election Reform bill (HR 811), recently introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Kennedy, an activist and actress well known for her role as Dharma's mother on ABC's Dharma and Greg, told The BRAD BLOG that during a Q & A period following his address last night, she asked Edwards whether he would join PDA in their campaign calling for "the complete removal of all Touch-Screen Direct Record Electronic voting machines from U.S. elections, with or without a paper trail."

Drawing an "X" in the air as the question was being asked, Edwards --- who was reportedly upset at Sen. John Kerry's decision not to contest the 2004 Presidential Election count, or lack thereof, in Ohio --- answered with a definitive "Yes!"

"Yes!" echoed Kennedy in response as the audience reportedly cheered and applauded.

Edwards's public support for a ban on DRE voting systems follows just over a week after Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA) was asked a related question by an Election Integrity advocate at a public event at the University of California/Santa Cruz. Waters announced, in response to the query, that she would be withdrawing her co-sponsorship of the Holt bill in the wake of the growing concerns about several troubling shortcomings in the proposed legislation.

Kennedy attended the event, sponsored by the Pacific Palisades Democratic Club, with friend and former TAXI co-star Rhea Perlman, who unsuccessfully tried to video tape the Q & A session on her cell phone. The BRAD BLOG is attempting to locate a complete video of the event and we'll update this item if and when we do.

Before an audience estimated at 400, Kennedy rose and said to the former Vice-Presidential candidate...

Guest Blogged by Alan Breslauer

Former House Judiciary Chairman Representative James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) was an inspired choice for Human Events Man of the Year. Considering the "news" source champions "above all, a staunch, unwavering defense of American freedom," who better to receive its top honor than the Congressman who introduced the USA PATRIOT Act and authored the Real ID Act. This video (4:30), which includes parts of a lovely introduction by Human Events Assistant Editor Amanda Carpenter, is whittled down from Sensenbrenner's twenty minute speech Friday at CPAC. Be sure to stick around to hear Sensenbrenner's final recommendation per global warming which, in addition to making much of the speech superfluous, boggles the mind. Oh, and there is plenty of good material throughout including a United States Representative boasting about standing his ground to cries of injustice.

ADDITIONAL THOUGHT FROM BRAD: While enjoying the celebration of "American freedoms" personified by Sensenbrenner, perhaps a visit of this old BRAD BLOG chestnut will be amusing and/or enlightening.